Tuesday, May 1, 2007

USB 3.0

The point of USB is to standardize communication systems. It cannot do this, however, unless it is flexible enough to operate in the manner required by a vast variety of applications. Here, the creators of the USB protocol made a few fatal mistakes:

The limited it. They limited the connection pin number, and they limited the connection frequencies. And as for going wireless, they limited it, I believe, to single connections.

Here, I will detail my idea for USB 3.0. If anyone wants to use this idea, they may, and in fact, I encourage them to. But the second they try to rip it out of its proper place in the public domain with patents or similar intellectually fascist methods, I intend to attack. Because just about any idea is obvious to those with the right background. But I won't rail on IP laws here. Back to USB 3.0. You get the point.

One of the ideas central to the USB standard is backwards compatibility. This means that to form a USB connection, you have to start at the lowest common denominator and scale up. USB 3 needs to be a simple addition to that. Here's how a connection should be made:

Host to device: Hello?
Device: I'm here on USB 1.1.
Host: Can you do USB 2.0?
Device: Yes.
Host: Can you do USB 3.0?
Yes. 1 connection, 2 bits, 500 MHz
Host: Scaling to 1 Gbps connection.

or, 5 years down the road-

Host: Can you do USB 3.0?
Device: wireless USB 3.0, 5 connections. One bit/connection, frequencies 4.00, 4.01, 4.02, 4.03, 4.04 GHz.
Host: scaling pseudo parallel connection. Enabling soft encryption.

Why do we need this? Simplicity. Today we have USB ports, DV I/O, PCIe, PCI, SATA, etc.
I want one type of connection and one only: USB 3.0. Monitor, Stereo vision headset, controllers, hubs, cards, drives, eeg's, wireless scanners, co processors, PSU's. Everything. And without royalties.

3 comments:

Jack Ludwig said...

Hi - saw your post on C/Net so I figured I'd come over and check out your blog. I agree with you, and I think things are headed in that direction. I remember back in the day when we had parallel ports and serial ports - my first computer (a TRS-80 Color Computer) stored data on cassette tape, plugged into a TV Atari-style and eventually had a diskette system that plugged into a cartridge port. It would be great to have one standard that could handle everything wirelessly and at it's full potential. I'm getting tired of my laptop being chained to my desktop because I'm too lazy to unplug the half dozen devices connected to it unless I really, really need to take it with me :)...

Anonymous said...

Very nice content! I like the USB 3.0 concept, hope this things will comes out quick.

Ethan Anderson said...

USB 3.0 has now been drafted and I think it'll hit the market during 2009.
I don't think it'll unify things, but for the most part it should be Good Enough; that is to say, I think we may have seen the last of firewire..